1. Field of the Invention
This invention is related to networks, and in particular to networks incorporating Quality of Service (“QOS”) features.
2. Related Art
There is an increasing interest in providing Quality of Service (“QoS”) to applications utilized on a network. There have been many approaches in the past for providing QoS for networks including Network User Priority-based QoS (often referred to simply as “priority-based QoS”) approaches. In these priority-based QoS networks, an individual application running on the network utilizes one or more priorities of a set of priorities for some of the individual application's data packet transmissions. For example, transmission of real-time voice communication data packets may need a high priority to maintain clear speech, but a transfer of data to print may incur brief pauses that are not perceptible to humans and therefore would not require a high priority. Additionally, each data packet transmitted has a priority. Generally, the individual application may arbitrarily assign a priority for a given transmitted data packet; however, it is often desirable to manage the use of these assigned priorities on the priority-based QoS network so that these priorities are not overused or oversubscribed. Thus there is need for assigning priorities on a priority-based QoS network for different types of data packets on the network without overusing or oversubscribing these priorities.
As a result, systems have been proposed for assigning priorities on these types of networks including, for example, the UPnP™ QoS specifications from the UPnP™ Forum that describe an UPnP™ architecture for QoS. UPnP™ stands for “Universal Plug and Play” and is defined by the documents listed via the Internet at website http://upnp.org. In the UPnP™ QoS architecture, a device or module (implemented in either hardware or software) known as “QoS Policy Holder” is utilized for assigning priorities on the network. Unfortunately, the approach of utilizing an UPnP™ QoS architecture is complex and expensive and a typical network may not have a unique QoS Policy Holder and, therefore, would be unable to have priorities assigned intelligently on the network. Further, some network devices may have more than one application or more than one type of data packets.
Therefore, there is a need for assigning priorities on a priority-based QoS network for different types of data packets on the network without overusing or oversubscribing these priorities. There is also a need for assigning priorities without having to utilize complex network architectures.